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Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas at Anata Primary School in the occupied city of Jerusalem on Monday morning, harming most of the students and teachers inside the school, local sources reported.

Deputy Headmaster Imad Eliyan said that the Israeli occupation forces “suddenly” fired a barrage of tear gas canisters at the school “without any justification.”

Speaking to the Press, Eliyan said that most of the students, who were in the playground of the school, along with the teachers, suffered from breathing difficulties and received first aid treatment due to the heavy tear gas.

He noted that the tear gas attack took place at 11am local time, when all the 340 young boys were in the schoolyard during the break.

Eliyan said that students and teachers of the neighbouring school were also affected by the tear gas attack.

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Bike-sharing programs are big right now. Designed for quick trips with convenience in mind, bike-sharing is a fun and affordable way to get around. A Dutch designer has devised a bike kitted up with air infiltration equipment that can eat smog and spit out clean air, helping to protect the lungs of individual riders. Now he‘s looking for an army of cyclists to power them.

Daan Roosegaarde, an inventor from the Netherlands and the designer behind the ethereal “glowing trees” project (read more about that here) and “glowing bike paths” (link here) is back at it with a new initiative that aims to not only beautify our environment, but actually clean it.

For years, his company, Studio Roosegaarde, has been incubating the Smog Free Project, a series of urban innovations that reduce airborne particulants and provide an inspirational peek into a clean future. Roosegaarde kicked off the project after he visited Beijing and saw the impacts of air pollution. “Some days I couldn’t see the other side of the street,” he told MotherBoard. Successful prototypes launched in China, Poland and the Netherlands include the Smog Free Tower and the Smog Free Ring, which provide a local solution of clean air in public spaces.

The Smog Free Bicycle is the latest addition to the portfolio, developed under an exclusive partnership with Ofo, the leading Chinese bike-sharing program Ofo which operates more than 2.2 million bikes in 43 cities. The bike draws its inspiration from the Smog Free workshop held in Beijing in 2017 which featured artist Matt Hope and Professor Yang from Tsinghua University. That event aimed to design solutions to mitigate air pollution problems in Beijing.The first prototypes launch this year.

Tapping into smog free tech, the custom bike inhales polluted air, cleans it, and releases it locally to the cyclist who would otherwise be sucking in toxic air as she/he pedaled through a dirty city environment. It is intended to become a medium for smog free cities, generating clean air to celebrate the bicycle and making thousands of them to create an impact on the larger urban scale.

“The project is about the dream of clean air, clean water and clean energy,” he said. The de-smogging process will be powered by a combination of pedaling and a small solar panel. The result is a clean, healthy breeze blowing into cyclists’ faces. If such a program was adopted on a huge scale, the bike-mounted smog scrubbers might even have a marginal impact on improving a city’s overall air quality.

Roosegaarde said he wants to focus on China first, where the bike is supported by the Chinese Central Government as part of its war on smog, but that doesn’t mean he’s not planning out the company’s next steps. His next stop is India.

“In the process, the smog particles are compressed and they clutter together so they can’t disconnect, and once they’ve connected on a negatively charged surface they’re not fine dust anymore [because they’ve clumped together to form a larger mass], and every month or two you clean the surface,” he said.

Roosegaarde said that there has to be some sort of incentive to get people to return the bikes, because China has a problem with bike thieves. Other aspects not yet defined include price points and timelines for release.

The World Health Organization rates China as the worst country in the world for outside air pollution. More than a million of its people died prematurely in 2012 due to fumes pumped out by factories, cars, and other sources. And, according to Wikipedia, as of December 2016 roughly 1000 cities worldwide have a bike-sharing program. In New York City alone, Citi Bike – the largest such program in America – offers 12,000 bikes at 750 stations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Jersey City. The potential to make a significant positive impact is enormous, especially when factoring in the reduction of gas-fueled vehicles as bicycles replace them.

Studio Roosegaarde wouldn’t say whether its biking system is intended to attack smog on the city-wide scale, as it’s still a nascent idea. Right now, it seems like the technology is intended to help protect the lungs of individual riders.

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One day after a Florida teenager walked into his former high school and carried out one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, at least seven other teens across the country walked into school with a gun.

The firearms were seized without harm in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Missouri and Texas, according to local news reports. Such incidents fuel the widespread fear that students often bring guns to school. But there’s no way to tell if this is true. There is no good data.

Because of lax reporting by schools and lax oversight by state and federal authorities — and despite federal law — it’s nearly impossible to say just how many students get caught taking firearms into public schools each year.

When a student is caught with a gun at school, the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act requires schools to report the incident to the school district, which is supposed to pass the information along to state education officials, who then are supposed to send it to the U.S. Department of Education. The idea behind the reporting requirement is to make it possible to detect trends and inform policymakers as they seek to address the problem.

But much of the information on the Education Department’s website is either outdated or inconsistent with state data. The department did not follow up to multiple questions and requests from Stateline for new and more comprehensive data.

In the past few years, school and state officials have not properly tracked deadly school shootings in Arizona and Colorado, and firearm-related school incidents in Maine. State education officials there say that while they collect statistics, they don’t enforce the reporting requirement.

In Maine, Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett said she wants to require the state’s Education Department to submit gun incident information to the Legislature each year, so lawmakers can ensure that the state is tracking the information accurately and can use it to make policy.

This data is incomplete, though. The federal numbers are lower than the numbers recorded by at least five states — Iowa, New Jersey, Maine, Maryland and Washington — in recent years, according to a Stateline review.

In Iowa, 15 firearm incidents were recorded in 2015-16. Only one shows up in the federal database. Iowa education officials did not respond to a follow-up question about why the state and federal data are different.

In Washington state, the federal data shows a decline from 162 firearm incidents in 2009-10 to 13 in 2015-16. But the state count shows 128 incidents in 2015-16, about the same as 2009-10, when there were 130 incidents. State education officials confirmed the state data is accurate.

Mike Donlin, program supervisor for the school safety center at the Washington Department of Education, said he wasn’t sure why the numbers were different.

Federal and state data grossly underestimate threats to schools, said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, an Ohio-based school safety consulting firm. With no nationally enforced reporting system, he said, schools’ reporting is a “goodwill effort.”

There are a few carrots and absolutely no sticks for local school districts to give data to the states, Trump said.

The best effort to track guns in schools might come at the local level, Trump said, but some school administrators might be reluctant. “There are some that believe that, ‘No data, no problem, but if there is data, we have to do something about it.’ ”

School administrators may try to keep firearm incidents under wraps, Trump said, to protect the school’s image, or their own.

“If their school comes in with numbers higher than a school on the other side of town,” he said, “those administrators may seem to be better at keeping the school safe, when in reality, they may have a less-safe school, they are just not honestly reporting.”

The 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act also requires students who bring guns to school be expelled for at least a year in most cases, but some gun advocates say it isn’t the federal government’s place to make such judgments.

States and local school systems should be the ones to decide whether students may bring guns to school, said Michael Hammond, legislative counsel at Gun Owners of America.

“When I grew up in the 60s in an inner city high school in Kansas City, I was in ROTC,” Hammond said. “I was issued an M-1 semiautomatic rifle when I was 13 and would walk back and forth with it on the playground. No one thought I’d shoot up the school.”

‘Quite Old’ Data

The U.S. Department of Education used to publish much more detailed annual reports, including how many times students were caught with guns, the related punishment, and the rate at which school systems in each state recorded the information. But the agency’s most recent comprehensive report covers the 2006-7 school year.

“Unfortunately, the latest data we have is quite old,” said Jo Ann Webb, a department spokeswoman.

In Arizona, the Department of Education hasn’t felt confident about its data for years, said Stefan Swiat, a department spokesman. The agency still receives information from schools, but it’s not complete.

The last year the Arizona school system knew it was getting comprehensive information from school districts was 2009, he said. That’s because, for a few years, the state had federal funding for a school crime-tracking program that also allowed the state to require local school systems to submit the data.

It’s crucial for the state to have comprehensive data so it can identify trends and have smart policy discussions, said Arizona state Rep. Daniel Hernandez, a Democrat.

Hernandez, who is also a board member at his local school district in Tucson, said his school district tracks firearms seized at schools, but that other districts track it differently.

Unlike other states, in Washington, state officials are fairly confident they are accurately tracking how many times students bring guns to school, said Donlin, with the state’s school safety center. State officials comb through the statistics looking for trends and spikes, such as when copycats come out after school shootings. They then work with school communities and law enforcement to mitigate future events.

‘Watch Me Be Cool Today’

High school students clearly are bringing guns to schools at a much higher rate than is characterized by the federal data, a national survey shows. About 4 percent of high school students say they brought a weapon to school at least once in the past month.

Many times, school resource officers, sworn officers who work in schools, are the first to hear about guns on school grounds, said Mac Hardy, director of operations for the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Students hear about rumors and social media posts and report it to the officers, Hardy said. Many times, students will bring a gun to school if they are being bullied, to appear tough to their tormentor. Most of the time, the gun is not loaded, or it’s a replica gun, such as an airsoft gun, he said, but it still creates a dangerous situation.

In Washington state, Donlin said sometimes students bring firearms to school for innocent reasons; perhaps they went hunting and forgot to take the gun out of the car. But there has been a recent uptick in students bringing guns for more troublesome reasons.

“Sometimes it’s real,” he said of the threats. “Sometimes it’s, ‘Watch me be cool today,’ or ‘I have a test tomorrow, it’s a good time to pull out my gun trick.’ ”

School communities need to act on these incidents, he said.

“ ‘See something say something’ is a simple thing to say, but it can be really effective,” Donlin said. “And the next step is: Do something — don’t just let it slip by.”

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The poisoning of an ex-Russian spy at a British shopping centre has drawn immediate parallels with other Kremlin opponents who’ve had a mysterious demise during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

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How many liberal governments has Italy ever had? Not so many, when you think about it. So, perhaps lumping the Italians in with other nationalists in Europe is a mistake. Or just a way for press to make headlines… grin. Italians opt for illiberal chaos, splitting Europe further.

Culture War is Class War disguised. The Wealthy Elite--the "Filthy Rich"--foment Culture War in society to distract and cover their real economic motives. Culture War, Class War explores the resulting cultural divide--how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they choose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.